WASHINGTON (AFP) -
Be it
election time or not, Americans love to groan about Washington. They
dismiss it as mired in nothing-works, nothing-gets-done gridlock. But
the dysfunction runs deeper. Literally.
To taste another kind of inertia in the seat of world power, ride the city's awful, bumbling subway.
Murphy's
law rules on the busiest US metro system after New York's: anything
that can go wrong does go wrong on a once-admired but now-decaying
network that carries more than 700,000 people a day.
Its main woes? Money, management and a design foible that makes for easy mayhem.
Trains,
tracks, switches, brand new escalators -- you name it -- are always
breaking down. Simple daily commutes morph into draining odysseys in a
work-obsessed town where everybody's in a hurry.
Lights in cars go
out, suddenly at times. Trains seem to be running fine, then abruptly
stop, a problem is reported, and exhale their load of irate travelers.
At rush hour on a bad day, station platforms can turn into seas of
stranded people.
After a recent spate of fire and smoke incidents
in tunnels, many users wonder if the system, now 40 years old, is even
safe anymore.
"Every morning that I know I am going to be riding
the train, I tell my wife which stations I will be going through so she
will know, just in case something happens," Tom Broadman, a 49-year-old
IT worker, said while riding a noisy, screeching Red Line train headed
downtown.
"It's that bad. It's a nightmare."
"I actually
changed jobs just to avoid having to use the metro," adds John
Cunningham, a 28-year-old bank employee. "It's pathetic."
Bottom
line: many Washingtonians find it appalling that a capital city from
which vast military and diplomatic power are projected around the world
cannot move trains reliably and safely from Point A to Point B.
On
March 16, with just hours' notice, the entire system shut down for an
unprecedented 29 hours so crews could inspect electrical cables that
have sparked several blazes.
- Major flaws -
Things were not always this ugly. Metrorail, as the subway system is called, opened in March 1976 to much fanfare.
Its
quiet, gleaming trains and high, arched station ceilings stood as a
futuristic symbol of city and national pride in the year America
celebrated its bicentennial.
"I remember riding the Metro for the
first time and it was this shiny, new ? it's like 'the Jetsons'. Like,
'Oh my God, this is the future,'" said Jack Evans, chairman of the board
of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which runs
Metrorail and the city's buses, recalling the summer of 1976 and the
Hanna-Barbera science-fiction cartoon series.
But the system was
created with two chinks that have proven costly as the subway expanded
to keep pace with the metropolitan area's population growth, and money
for repairs and upkeep became increasingly scarce.
First, while
other subway systems in America were built with three or four tracks,
Washington's has just two. This was done to save money.
That means
that when a train breaks down or track work needs to be done, trains
moving in opposite directions have to take turns sharing the same track
and ensuing travel delays can be very long -- a major gripe for riders.
- Scrounging for money -
Then
there is money, and geography. Metrorail is unique in that it spans
three jurisdictions -- Washington, and the neighboring states of
Maryland and Virginia, home to hundreds of thousands of people who work
in the nation's capital.
Representatives of all three sit on the
WMATA board, as do people from the federal government. This four-headed
structure complicates decision-making and has been criticized as
diluting accountability for the sad state of Metrorail.
Most of the board's 16 members have no hands-on experience with mass transit; they are political appointees.
What
is more, Metrorail lacks so-called "dedicated funding" for its $1.8
billion yearly operating budget: a tax or fee whose revenue goes only to
keep the trains up and running.
Instead, Evans said, "Every year I have to go, Metro has to go, to three different jurisdictions to get money."
Plus,
Metro needs billions of dollars in coming years to pay for improvement
projects like new cars -- most of those in use now are the original ones
from 1976 -- and a new tunnel under the Potomac River, Evans said.
"They
are not things that it would be nice if we could do them. They are
essential things, things you must do, and I don't have the money," Evans
said.
He said the system is still mechanically safe but no longer a reliable way to get someplace on time.
Things will probably get worse before they get better, Evans added.
Paul
Wiedefeld, who used to run the Baltimore-Washington international
airport, took over as Metrorail's new general manager in November,
assuming what was probably the least wanted job in the city at a really
tense time.
The system suffered a surge in fire and smoke
incidents last year; one woman died and scores were injured when smoke
engulfed a downtown train in January 2015. A federal safety board report
issued Tuesday blamed bad management and maintenance.
Wiedefeld
has promised to present a long-term maintenance plan soon. And some have
defended him for putting safety first and shutting down that day,
knowing it would raise hell, which it did.
But Metro has few fans
of late. After the March 16 closure, The Washington Post -- unofficial
arbiter and depository of things Washingtonian -- called it a "national
embarrassment, an amateur operation."
Days later, a Twitter user
with the handle @ironmanjt wrote: "Passenger in front of me just crossed
herself boarding #WMATA train and is now saying Hail Mary."
by Daniel Woolls
© 2016 AFP
